Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Vivekananda and Gandhi sought to save Hinduism while reforming the caste system. Other reformers more directly challenged the principle of caste itself. The most famous of these radicals, B.R. Ambedkar, is represented in this book. But two other fascinating and intriguing figures are not. One was Iyothee Thass, a gifted Tamil activist of Untouchable origins who later embraced Buddhism; the other was Narayana Guru, a charismatic preacher whose mobilization of low castes in Kerala lies behind that state’s widely praised work in bringing education and health care to the rural poor.12

  I was particularly sorry not to have found space for one of my favourite Indians. This is Dadabhai Naoroji, the businessman, social reformer, author and activist who helped found the Indian National Congress, who became the first Asian ever to become a member of the British parliament (in the 1890s), who lobbied for decades for the rights of Indians with the British government, and who was an early influence on Gandhi. Naoroji also wrote several books, at least one of which was widely read by nationalists. The book was called Poverty and Un-British Rule in India; it chastised the rulers for focusing on draining wealth out of the subcontinent rather than on fostering economic development within it. The book and its themes are somewhat dated in this post-colonial age, but in his day Naoroji was an important figure.13

  The churning provided by the colonial encounter led to a range of rich and fascinating writings in the various Indian languages. Some of this is represented here, in translation; but a great deal could not be. One reason, of course, is space; another is my focus on politics and social reform. Contemporaneous with the individuals featured in this book were a set of creative writers, operating in the various Indian languages, who used poetry and fiction to articulate and nurture new ways of thinking and feeling. These writers cultivated a distinctively modern sensibility, which paid greater attention to the individual self and to interpersonal relations. The changes they collectively wrought in the domain of culture were profound and long-lasting. Regrettably, their work and influence lie beyond the scope of this book.

  The Republic of India has twenty-eight states, each of which had its own set of radicals and reformers who wrote insightfully on politics, society or culture. The present selection cannot ever hope to satisfy the strong linguistic and regional sentiments prevalent in India. About the reception of this book, I am certain only about one thing: that each region and language will have its own special grouse about people I have left out. That being the case, perhaps it can provoke a series of volumes (by other hands) on the ‘Makers of Modern Bengal’, the ‘Makers of Modern Tamil Nadu’, and so on.14

  Despite the omissions acknowledged and unacknowledged, we have here a very diverse body of work indeed. The individuals represented here come from all parts of India. Born in north, south, east and west, many also travelled extensively in parts of the country that were not originally their own. They wrote in various languages, among them Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Marathi and English. They were born in different castes and display a wide variety of religious and political orientations. Three are Muslims, while among the Hindus there are Brahmins, Banias, Sudras and former Untouchables. At least four of these thinkers were as much shaped by Christianity as by Hinduism. One was born a Hindu but died a Buddhist. Another was ordained as a Christian priest but later left the church, being attracted, successively, to tribal faiths and to Buddhism. Several were anti-religious atheists who never said a prayer or entered a temple (nor a mosque or church either). There are only two women, but at least six of the men campaigned energetically for gender equality.15

  In terms of conventional political categories, we have here two conservative or right-wing thinkers, about half a dozen liberals and as many socialists. Then there is Gandhi, who cannot be categorized according to convention at all, unless one sees him as being at once socialist, liberal and conservative.

  The diversity of individuals and ideologies is matched by a suitable diversity of themes. The topics explored and analysed in these pages include race, religion, caste, gender, tribe, language, nationalism, colonialism, democracy, economic development, violence and non-violence—that is to say, all that is significant and important in the human condition.

  In this respect, it is tempting to compare this volume to Richard Hofstadter’s magisterial book on the American political tradition. The politicians whose legacies Hofstadter so skilfully analysed were all male, all Christian, and all English-speaking.16 The far greater diversity on offer here is in part a product of the distinctive and different experiences of my thinker-activists; and in part a product of the heterogeneity of their homeland. Sociologically speaking, one might view India as having three principal axes of diversity, these represented by religion, language and region respectively; and as simultaneously having three principal axes of disparity, these represented by caste, gender and class. In terms of these six categories, these thinkers had widely varying backgrounds and life experiences, which were reflected in their writings (as well as in their political choices).

  The Indians featured in this book all led very unusual lives. They travelled overseas and lost caste by doing so. They opposed the British rulers and so found themselves in jail. Later, they fought among themselves and thus found themselves out of favour or out of office. They lived in tumultuous times, which they helped sometimes to tame, and at other times to make even more tumultuous.

  As I worked through the collected writings of these thinker-activists, reading standard works still sold in bookshops as well as fugitive pamphlets that are unavailable even in the best libraries, I was struck by the congruence of substance with style. The nineteen individuals included here all wrote very fluently in their own languages and at least half a dozen were fluent in English as well. One was a Nobel Prize-winning author; others were educated in the great universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, London, Wisconsin and Berlin. Most of them could have, if they had so chosen, made a living from journalism—indeed, many ran their own journals to further their social and political campaigns.

  What these nineteen Indians saw and experienced was exciting and important enough. We are exceptionally fortunate that they presented what they saw and experienced in such compelling prose. While their language was sometimes idiosyncratic, it was always expressive. The eccentricities of syntax and grammar notwithstanding, the arguments were made with clarity and directness.

  Political partisans, past and present, would tend to foreground the work and contribution of their particular hero (or heroine). I have chosen instead to view each thinker and life as nesting within a wider and longer tradition of democratic debate and dispute. Viewed individually, in isolation, they may provide consolation to one or another sect or party; taken together, they provide proof of the depth and robustness of the Indian political tradition.

  V

  After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there was an outpouring of books reflecting upon the rivalry between totalitarian and democratic political systems. Some were triumphalist, seeing the victory of the West as inevitable and owing to the superiority of its institutions and values. Others were more introspective, recognizing that the two major forms of totalitarianism, fascism and Marxism-Leninism, were themselves invented in the West and that they had, for large swathes of the twentieth century, a profound appeal for Western intellectuals and opinion-makers.17

  More recently, the market for serious political writing has been invaded by books opposing Western ideals to Islamic fundamentalism, since the latter now appears to have replaced secular totalitarianism as the major threat to the democratic way of life. Once more, the mood varies: where some books are apocalyptic and even hysterical, viewing Islam as in every way irreconcilable with modernity, others are more sober and accommodative, seeking to wean ordinary Muslims away from the grip of fanatics and into the home camp of liberal democrats.18

  These books, published in the wake of the lifting of the Iron Curtain, have sought to defend Western democracy against its enemies at ho
me and abroad. From this perspective, Soviet Russia stood menacingly against the West during the Cold War, its work aided by malign or misguided fellow travellers living within democratic capitalist countries. With Islamism the threat is likewise internal as well as external. On the one hand, there are jihadi terrorists waiting to attack Westerners and Western institutions everywhere, as part of a global campaign for dominance; on the other hand, there are the growing numbers of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe and North America, who tend to live in enclosed ghettos rather than integrate with the host society.

  To this writer, what is remarkable about this substantial (and still growing) literature is that it largely ignores India. Some books may have a passing reference or two to this country, others do not even grant it that favour. Yet one would think that given its size, diversity and institutional history, the Republic of India would provide a reservoir of political experience with which to refine or rethink theories being articulated in the West. For six decades now, democratic India has lived next to, and somehow coped with, an even larger and more populous nation run as a single-party state. Its other neighbours have included military dictatorships and absolutist monarchies. For the same period of time, India, a dominantly Hindu country, has had as equal citizens of the nation a substantial Muslim minority. As the historian W.C. Smith wrote more than fifty years ago, it was only in modern, post-colonial India that Muslims lived in very large numbers without being the ruling power. Here they shared their citizenship ‘with an immense number of other people. They constitute the only sizable body of Muslims in the world of which this is, or ever has been, true’.19

  That was certainly the case in 1957, but now some Western nations also have large Muslim minorities of their own. Thus India provides a test case of the challenges to democracy from its critics on the left and the right; and a test case of the challenge to social harmony posed by a multi-religious citizenry. Which makes its current irrelevance to modern debates on politics and citizenship all the more surprising.

  The absence of a substantial literature on Indian political ideas may be one reason why the country is rarely invoked in wider discussions on democracy and its rivals. Responding to this neglect, the economist Amartya Sen has published a book drawing our attention to the long history of intellectual debate in South Asia. Sen argues that there existed, among scientists and philosophers of the subcontinent, a rational and critical tradition of enquiry that was often as vital and influential as rival traditions based on faith and mysticism. He further claims that ideas of democracy and secularism associated with modern India were anticipated by kings who ruled in the ancient and medieval periods.20

  In speaking of India, or indeed of any other country or civilization, one must distinguish between two argumentative traditions—the distant and the proximate. By the first I mean traditions of debate that were distinctive of long-dead states and kingdoms; by the second, those traditions which actually shaped the political and social institutions of the present. With one exception (the poet Rabindranath Tagore) Sen’s own focus is on thinkers of the remote past. This is fair enough—except that Sen then claims, on the basis of little evidence, that these distant arguments shaped the ideals of the Indian Constitution and the practices of the Indian nation-state.21

  Makers of Modern India deals centrally with the arguments and arguers of the past two centuries. The choice is dictated in part by the fact that I am myself a historian of the modern period, and in part by the fact that the India we know today has been shaped far more by plebeians who lived closer to our time than by ancient monarchs. This is a book aimed in the first instance at those interested in Indian history, who might wish to acquire a fuller understanding of how this unnatural nation and unlikely democracy was argued into existence. However, given India’s size and representativeness, I hope that the materials it contains may yet help make the country somewhat less marginal to global debates on the political system(s) most appropriate to the twenty-first century.

  * * *

  Part I

  The Opening of the Indian Mind

  * * *

  Introduction to Part I

  Writing of British rule in India, Karl Marx remarked that ‘England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution’.

  The vile interests that brought the British to India were the search for gold, spices and textiles. Other European powers had the same motives—although some were also searching for Christian converts. The Portuguese arrived on the west coast at the end of the fifteenth century, with the Dutch, the French and the British following soon afterwards. In the eighteenth century the focus of the European traders shifted to the east coast and, in particular, to the province of Bengal, which had a flourishing textile industry and was also the source of rich supplies of rice, sugar and saltpetre.

  Bengal was then under the control of a Muslim prince who owed allegiance to the Mughals in Delhi. In 1757 the forces of the British East India Company defeated the army of this prince in battle. Eight years later, the Mughals transferred economic and political control of the province of Bengal to the Company. They were now responsible for collecting land revenue, for controlling the trade, for framing the laws and for running the civil and military administration.

  Bengal provided a base from which the British slowly expanded to other parts of India. At the end of the eighteenth century, they defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore to make their presence felt in the south. The defeat of the Peshwas in 1818 extended their reach to the west; the defeat of the Sikhs of the Punjab in the 1840s made them sovereign through much of the north. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the East India Company thus controlled virtually all of the subcontinent, either directly or through alliances with subordinate—and subservient—maharajas and nawabs.

  British rule was enforced and consolidated by a network of native collaborators. Themselves a minuscule minority, the Europeans relied on Indian merchants to help organize their trade, Indian soldiers to staff their armies, Indian clerks to keep accounts, Indian officials and village headmen to collect taxes.

  In 1793 the British instituted a ‘Permanent Settlement’ in eastern India where, following what they had done in Ireland, they promoted a class of large landlords responsible for collecting revenue. The impact of the Permanent Settlement has been much debated by historians. The general view is that it created a class of indolent and self-satisfied exploiters and left the real tillers of the land with no incentive to improve it. Agricultural productivity stagnated in Bengal and its neighbouring provinces. On the other hand, in the west and south, where the East India Company chose to deal more directly with peasant proprietors, there was far more energy in the rural economy.

  British rule also changed the urban landscape of Bengal. The old capital, Murshidabad, declined, while the newer settlement of Calcutta prospered. Located on the Hooghly, Calcutta emerged as an active port and administrative centre. The rural gentry who were the beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement flocked here to make their homes, visiting their estates at erratic intervals.

  By the 1820s, Calcutta had a permanent population of at least 2,50,000. There was a white town and a black town, each characterized by spacious and well-staffed houses where lived the European and the Indian elite. In between the two, and on the margins, were a ‘scattered and confused chaos of houses, huts, sheds, streets and lanes, alleys, windings, gutters, sinks and tanks’ where lived the workers and artisans who serviced the elite.

  The printing press was another British import into Bengal that was arguably as consequential as the Permanent Settlement. According to the historian B.S. Kesavan, the first book printed in the province was Nathaniel Halhe
d’s Grammar of the Bengali Language, which appeared in 1778. Twenty years later, the Baptist priest William Carey transported a printing press to his mission in Serampore. The Serampore Press now issued a steady stream of books in many European and Indian languages. According to one source, it printed more than 2,00,000 items in the first thirty years of its existence, and in as many as forty different languages. Serampore quickly found its imitators, with other presses being established to print religious texts, philosophical works, grammars and dictionaries.

  The consumers of this growing literature were Bengali as well as British. They read books as well as newspapers, which by the early nineteenth century had become a part of the public sphere in Bengal. Through their reading, educated Indians became acquainted with their own sacred texts as well as with the most recent trends in Western science and philosophy. They now sought to take this knowledge to the next generation. In 1817, a Calcutta School-Book Society was established, whose members included Bengali Hindus and Muslims, as well as Europeans. In its first four years, the society had printed and distributed some 1,25,000 copies of books published in half a dozen languages.

  The book society was but one sign of a growing associational culture in colonial Bengal. Some members of the Hindu and Muslim middle class poured their collective energies into faith—establishing or refurbishing temples and mosques and vigorously celebrating community festivals. Others took a more secular turn, starting schools, newspapers and discussion societies. This latter group had been given a wake-up call by the new rulers. They were challenged by Western missionaries, who poured contempt on their idolatry and practice of caste; and by French Enlightenment thought, which asked why Hindu and Muslim tradition paid such little attention to the rights of individuals.